Expanding

Why I’m Not Getting Any Better

Play, Self-discovery By May 7, 2023 No Comments

So I’ve been practicing the violin again this week and it feels like I’m starting from scratch. Scratch means scales and finger exercises and bowing maneuvers and striving. Striving to improve.

The idea of striving to get better didn’t just come up for me in the practice room this week. When I went to my local violin shop and tried out a few more instruments better rose up to smack me fresh across the face. A mother and her daughter were in line ahead of me also shopping for violins. The young violinist couldn’t have been any older than fifteen, and her mother proudly informed their sales person that she had been playing for eleven years. They took a handful of fine instruments into one of the rooms off the main lobby where we all heard the daughter begin to rip through Mendelssohn at tremendous speed.

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Violin

Once, Twice, and Again

Play, Self-discovery By April 21, 2023 No Comments

Once, in a fit of teenaged passion, I sold the possession most dear to me to buy my first car.

That’s right, some lucky person paid pennies on the pegboard for my precious fiddle and bow, and I, being eighteen and desperate for freedom, hardly thought twice about it.

What I did think about was this: I didn’t want to be the well-behaved repressed violinist anymore. I didn’t want to push anymore toward some unattainable standard of musical excellence, and I really didn’t want to keep falling short. I wanted road trips and nights out with friends that bled into endless dawns. Gas pumps and freeways and gear shifts. I wanted my great wild beyond.

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Bath-anna-kaehler

I Am (in the bath)

Change, Self-discovery By January 25, 2023 2 Comments

This person I thought up

This person I am

is becoming something else

entirely

The bath she fills

drop by drop

and the crumbs on the table,

new foundlings

Patterns assemble

but less fixed

more space in

the kaleidoscope’s eye,

grounding

Days are songs

their verses come hither

and loving,

alone in the bath

is ecstatic drowning

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Please show me

Please Show Me

An Authentic Life, Change By September 11, 2022 No Comments

I just got off the phone with a friend who is going through an Enormous Life Event. It’s one of those rites of passage most of us will experience—the passing of a parent—with all its attendant emotions, requirements, and mind-splattering world alterations. In short, it’s an effing lot.

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inspire

The Great Receiver

Communication, Power, Writing By September 7, 2021 No Comments

By day I work in real estate, meaning I get to see and show a lot of homes. I never have the same day twice, and this suits my personality pretty well. Some days go above and beyond variation, however. Some days I get lessons in receiving that make it clear to me how connected we are, no matter what we are doing and even if we don’t always feel it.

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What if we can

What If We Can

Communication, Compassion, Oceans, Writing By August 29, 2021 No Comments

I took myself to Yachats on a little writing retreat last weekend, intent on spending some dedicated time with the page. The retreat would be short—a night at the beach in what turned out to be a very loud room, the Captain’s Quarters, with a very deep clawfoot bathtub that would not hold water no matter how passionately I argued with the plug. It would be a full blue moon that night and I had two whole days to myself, all ingredients for the perfect productive storm.

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Knowing

Knowing

Change, Self-discovery, Writing By August 7, 2021 Tags: No Comments

Summer in Portland—those longed for, beatific days promising dry weather for play—is as much a darling as dominatrix.

There’s the constant pressure to get outside, and then there’s the still, hot air when you do. We run for shade and we bathe our delicate Pacific Northwest skins in sunscreen from hairline to pinkie toes. Ahhh, we sweat at each other, glorious. And won’t it be an even more glorious fall?

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